Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday March 09, 2012 @09:35AM
from the plotting-out-a-person dept.

porsche911 points out a recent post by Stephen Wolfram in which he plots out data on his communication habits collected over a period of years — or in some cases, decades. He presents visualizations of the times and frequency of a third of a million emails since 1989, 100 million keystrokes since 2002, phone calls, meetings, modification times on his personal files, and even the number of footsteps he takes in a day. It provides some interesting correlations and insights into the structure of a person's life, and how that structure shifts over the years. He says,
"What is the future for personal analytics? There is so much that can be done. Some of it will focus on large-scale trends, some of it on identifying specific events or anomalies, and some of it on extracting 'stories' from personal data. And in time I'm looking forward to being able to ask Wolfram|Alpha all sorts of things about my life and times—and have it immediately generate reports about them. Not only being able to act as an adjunct to my personal memory, but also to be able to do automatic computational history—explaining how and why things happened—and then making projections and predictions. As personal analytics develops, it’s going to give us a whole new dimension to experiencing our lives."

Leave him alone. He has a vision, he's doing what he likes, and apparently makes a good living at it. And there's a better-than-normal chance he'll find something interesting to the world at large, too.

If he wanted to be left alone, all he had to do was SHUT UP! Same as if Shuttlewirth doesn't want to be criticized, he should stop making stupid announcements that are a joke - like his latest brainfart about Ubuntu "out-innovating" Apple and Microsoft.

At first glance, the whole idea of personal analytics seems kind of worthless. But imagine comparing analytics among populations and drawing correlations between habits, lifestyle choices, and diseases. That could be a helpful step toward the kind of preventative health care we need as a people. Lifestyle choices matter a lot more than the strictly-retroactive fix-me-up-after-my-heart-clogs-up-with-french-fry-grease healthcare that much of the US and I'm sure other countries seem to encourage.

You can never think about social issues at the individual scale. Preventative, holistic health care has worked very well increasing the well-being and life-span of people in developed countries. It just moves slow because a whole society has a lot of inertia.

As an example, I've been reading alarming stuff about the obesity epidemics for decades. My generation was raised on TV, fast food, sweets, soda and beer. Things are starting to turn around. There's an increasing number of people making exercise and

We have medical records already. Comparisons across populations already happen. The effect of habits on lifestyles can already be measured. Choices are available. Education is imposed Unfortunately, the two things we've found that make any significant difference to people's health are where they live and how much money they've got.

As for personal analytics, there's little chance of that extending beyond the small, self-selecting group that has a temporary interest. We've been able to count calories and

lets assume these tests were actually effective (big assumption). So they do a great job selecting candidates that are best for the position. Work places become better, but job hunting becomes worse. Do people want to take the chance of being one of the poor guys that gets bounced out by these tests some day for the reward of working with better peers.

Personally I like the balance generally where it is. I'll accept that I sometimes have to work with people wh

I find this fascinating. What I find even more fascinating is how can the man sustain such a momentus amount of activity while maintaining a family? Seriously, he works every waking hour of every day, with no interruption of email activity except dinner and sleep... Where does his family fit in? In my case, my wife won't let me, so perhaps this is just my unique situation. Anyone else have commentary on family life vs work/passion life?

Old joke: "Behind every successful man is a woman with a credit card". But this was a play on yet another old saying, "Behind every successful man is a woman".

Anecdote:A friend of mine's father was working his way up the corporate ladder working for a big oil company. A number of times he got the phone call at work which said, "We need you to relocate to location X for project Z". He would say "yes", go home early inform my friend's mom and start packing his suitcase. Mom would then start calling the school

Say nothing of his family. Looking ONLY at the probability of time he spends on the phone, this guy looks like the WORST fucking manager in the world. I would NOT want to work for this man. He's a CEO? He should be a CTO sure.

Don't talk about life. Don't analyze life. And most importantly, don't view your own life from a 3rd person perspective 24/7. Observation and introspection is healthy. Too much of it is a waste of time. If you're having to think about your life all the time, it means your not living it. And if you're not living it, do something about it. Don't just sit on the sidelines.

What if your happiness *is* statistics and analytics? As long as you're happy doing it and its pursuit makes you a living and gives the rest of us insight that lets us all benefit from a higher quality of life, I'd say that's a pretty damn good chunk of life. Of course it has to be balanced in a healthy way with interpersonal relationships but this same logic applies to biosciences and chemistry.

Your "insightful advice" sounds more like condescension. It's dismissive of an entire class of meaningful occupations without considering their individual habits. Simply dismissing anyone who invests any time in personal analytics as "sitting on the sidelines" and wasting their lives is intellectually dishonest, even when hedged with, "Observation and introspection is healthy. Too much of it is a waste of time."

Wolfram is an ass, a self centered, megalomaniacal little "Timelord" wannabe, who says what he does for the love of attention not because it has any scientific relevance, the term "attention whore" comes to mind!

Don't talk about life. Don't analyze life. And most importantly, don't view your own life from a 3rd person perspective 24/7. Observation and introspection is healthy. Too much of it is a waste of time. If you're having to think about your life all the time, it means your not living it. And if you're not living it, do something about it. Don't just sit on the sidelines.

This is pretty sweet. I'll bet you could get all sorts of insight about a life in this fashion. But what are the chances that (the average) someone will be able to gather this data and run the analysis and then keep the resulting insight under their own control? What are the chances that this data could be used by a person to improve their quality of life, as opposed to used by a corporation to more effectively vacuum up the money and utility people shed?

Everybody who doesn't have a personal analytics database under their control and does have a Facebook 'timeline' knows the answer to this question already. And the ones who don't know the answer are the answer...

Sure, my memory will fail me in the future (it's already crap now), but I'm okay with that. If I were living in a time where this sort of detailed breakdown and analysis were applied to everyone, I'd much rather forget things and not understand the reasons behind events 100% than have a database of every little detail of my life in it for anyone who'd pay to check it out. If one guy decides to do it for himself, I guess that's cool for him. But when you take this idea to its logical conclusion and start applying this to large groups of people, it sounds much too like Big Brother for me to be comfortable with at all.

It also strikes me as the most likely way people would wind up living in some sort of Orwellian, totalitarian state. At first, they'll tell us of all the benficial things this could give us, and phase it in gradually. They might tell us of how it could help medicine, and we agree to let them start monitoring our food and drink consumption, along with our exercise habits. And when something good, such as a cure for some difficult to vanquish disease, comes as a result, people will see that it provided them some tangible benefit this time. And from there it will slowly bleed out into other areas of life. This slow, creeping invasion of privacy strikes me as a much more likely route to such a future than such a government having a revolution and things changing overnight.

Personal analytics on large populations will ultimately suffer from the same problem so many schemes involving information and power do. If it happens, we'll probably have welcomed it for the perceived benefits to society we can get from it on a small scale, naively believing individuals in positions of power will be benevolent rulers. Most people will act shocked when this power is abused and steadily has its limits expanded. The rest of us will sit down and say, "When we were talking about this happening 20 years ago, we were the conspiracy nutjobs, eh? I'd say I told you so and leave you to deal with it, but instead I'll thank you for screwing me over too."

He presents visualizations of the times and frequency of a third of a million emails since 1989, 100 million keystrokes since 2002, phone calls, meetings, modification times on his personal files, and even the number of footsteps he takes in a day.

I thought his comment about believing that other persons were also tracking this type of information about their activities and then finding out that they weren't was very interesting. Did he just project this onto the others based on his own behaviors, or did they throw out a quick comment about how that might be interesting but then promptly forgot about it?

OCD is always a liability, by definition. If it's not a liability, it doesn't qualify as a disorder, and you don't have OCD, you're just particular. Or pedantic. Or whatever you want to call it, but you're not suffering from a clinical mental disease.

OCD is always a liability, by definition. If it's not a liability, it doesn't qualify as a disorder, and you don't have OCD

I have known several people with varying degrees of OCD. Some with minor quirks that weren't debilitating... some much more severe and in need of being under care.

I guess clinically you could describe it more like Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder [wikipedia.org] -- to Freud it included "anal retentive character", though, I mostly think of Freud as a coke-head with dodgy ideas.

He presents visualizations of the times and frequency of a third of a million emails since 1989, 100 million keystrokes since 2002, phone calls, meetings, modification times on his personal files, and even the number of footsteps he takes in a day.

The blog post is much longer, and there is much more analysis than real, meaningful, useful results. So many numbers and pretty graphs, but no conclusions: what is good, what should change, what is bad, what should not change.

Yeah, it really seems like a terribly longwinded way of saying, "I went OCD and started tracking all this stuff, and I graphed it. Pretty cool, huh?" He doesn't draw any conclusions about it, or even provide some sort of practical uses for it. If my memory is fuzzy about something, I've got a way less time consuming method of getting the info about it. I call up the friends I was with at the time and ask them if they remember whatever it is I forgot. Of course, this method assumes you have friends, an

This is fascinating if for no other reason than to compare against my own workday. It's quite evident that this guy's day starts at roughly 10am and ends by about 3pm. So on average 5 hours of work per day. I wish my work day looked like that, even if it meant meant some work on the weekends.

This guy is pioneering digitizing life (something that on this scale, is for the most part unexplored territory). He just might be ahead of his time, this might become the norm in 10-20 years. You assholes are doing nothing but putting him down. Do you think he's an idiot? Do you know how hard it is to develop something as intricate as the site he made? Could you have done any better? Shut the hell up. _You're making fun of nerd on a nerd news site_. Furthermore this nerd will probably be more successful an

And what is it exactly that he has accomplished with this? He's certainly a succesful businessman, but what in this article is actually supposed to impress me with its pioneering vision? This man has meticulously documented the minutiae of his day to day life for years and years, then taken this data and produced graphs which tell us...not much of anything, actually. We can tell he wakes up and goes to sleep at largely the same times most days, and also eats dinner at the same time. But please, I'm just

Having access to your own data produces a very positive feedback loop. If you can see your schedule drifting, you can reorient yourself to correct it quickly. I keep track of a few things such as when I wake up, go to sleep, get to work, leave work, and a small handful of personal metrics such as a numeric value for how effective I was at work on a given day.. I've learned a lot from it. For example, I have a better idea now of how my level of engagement (# of hours worked) relates to how effective I am. If

This is the typical average response from slashdot readers since most of us can only claim to be better than others rather than actually proving it. Hence, the need to make others smaller. Sadly, much of human interaction falls into this category and its likely that comparisons like that Wolfram's life log provides will only prove that to be true. I wish it weren't so as it would then be easier to find interesting things in slashdot without having to wade to inordinate amounts of self-preening to find in

The time spent analyzing emails and phone calls could have been spent learning how to write more effective emails, make more effective phone calls etc. Don't analyze your life to death and then brag about it. Organize it so that you maximize your gain for minimum effort.